Medical Breakthroughs And The Assholes Who Hate Them
Isabelle Dinoire tried to commit suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills on May 27 of this year. Her family dog tried to wake her by licking her face, and when that didn't work, the dog horrifically started chewing her face off. Dinoire was in such a deep drug-induced sleep that she didn't wake up, even after the dog tore off her nose and mouth. One of Dinoire's daughters found her and called an ambulance. This is not a scene from a Thomas Harris novel, this really happened, and it is the backstory to the recent face transplant Dinoire received.
Transplanting a cadaver's face onto a patient with severe facial injuries is a good thing. There is no moral difference between doing that and transplanting a liver or kidney. This is a breakthough in medicine that should be cheered. Think of all the people, socially ostracized because of horrible facial deformities, that will benefit from this sort of treatment. I don't hear the cheers from the media though. The only sound is the whining and bitching of some American doctors and self-appointed media ethicists, who are wagging their fingers at the French doctors that performed the surgery.
Let's take the issues raised by the critics one by one:
The patient tried to commit suicide and is too psychologically fragile to deal with this operation.
The fact that her injuries resulted from a suicide attempt is irrelevant. Would a burn victim be turned down because he or she fell asleep with a lit cigarette? The fact is Dinoire is a willing participant in a procedure that is pushing at the very frontiers of medicine. To say that Dinoire will have psychological issues to deal with is both incredibly obvious and absurd. Certainly, the face is more important psychologically than a new kidney - looking into the mirror and seeing a different face has to be disturbing. I would argue that looking into the mirror and seeing the corpse-like face of a person with no nose or mouth is a tad bit more fucking disturbing.
The French doctors moved too fast. The transplant was a publicity stunt, and was rushed so the team would be the first to perform this surgery.
To me this is the only issue with any credibility. If the doctors rushed to be the first to try the surgery without perfecting the techniques necessary, then sure that would be an ethical issue. However, the surgery was successful - all the arteries and veins were connected right, the tissue wasn't rejected, and the patient is now recovering. Obviously the doctors knew what they were doing. Also, since this is a brand-new procedure, someone has to do it first. Human face transplant procedures will only be perfected when surgeons start doing them.
Are the surgeons involved looking for personal glory? Sure. I imagine most surgeons are egotistical, and I'm sure they are partially motivated by the fame that will result from being the first to do this operation. Is there anything done anywhere for anybody that isn't at least partially self-motivated? If this turns out to be a success, like it appears to be in the early stages of Dinoire's recovery, then these doctors should be famous, and lauded.
It is unethical to transplant a human face because the face is so strongly associated with who one is.
I don't understand this argument but I hope I expressed it fairly. Some people think that face transplants step over some invisible line that Man Was Not Meant To Cross. Some people think, incorrectly, that the person receiving the transplant will look just like the donor. This is unlikely, given the underlying bone and muscle structural differences between donor and receiver.
However, even if this is true, is that the worst thing in the world? If we take the face from a dead person and give it to someone with a terrible facial injury, what exactly is the downside to that? So that person strongly resembles the dead person now...lots of people look like lots of other people. How often is the recipient of the face going to bump into the donor's parents?
Criticism of this transplant is motivated by several distasteful reasons: jealousy (by those doctors who were beaten to the punch), self-serving publicity (you get a lot more press by being against something than for it, just ask Jeremy Rifkin), and lack of imagination.
By this last category I mean those that lack the insight to push against the boundaries of convention and accept possibilities that, while admittedly strange at first glance, can help people in a profoundly meaningful way. People that are opposed to face transplants just because they are "weird" will also be against human cloning, which has plenty of altruistic applications people don't like to talk about. Cloning of human cells can result in such horrific abominations as cloned organs and tissues that won't be rejected by recipients and yes, babies for infertile people. Would it really be the worst thing in the world if an infertile or homosexual couple raised a child that was a clone?
That makes me wonder, do anti-cloning nutjobs run screaming when they see identical twins? Guess what, CLONES! People like to talk about what's "natural." Well, the natural world is full of murder, rape, cannibalism, and infanticide (just watch a nature show for 10 minutes and you'll figure that out). We humans have minds that will let us transcend nature, and that is NOT a bad thing.
Transplanting a cadaver's face onto a patient with severe facial injuries is a good thing. There is no moral difference between doing that and transplanting a liver or kidney. This is a breakthough in medicine that should be cheered. Think of all the people, socially ostracized because of horrible facial deformities, that will benefit from this sort of treatment. I don't hear the cheers from the media though. The only sound is the whining and bitching of some American doctors and self-appointed media ethicists, who are wagging their fingers at the French doctors that performed the surgery.
Let's take the issues raised by the critics one by one:
The patient tried to commit suicide and is too psychologically fragile to deal with this operation.
The fact that her injuries resulted from a suicide attempt is irrelevant. Would a burn victim be turned down because he or she fell asleep with a lit cigarette? The fact is Dinoire is a willing participant in a procedure that is pushing at the very frontiers of medicine. To say that Dinoire will have psychological issues to deal with is both incredibly obvious and absurd. Certainly, the face is more important psychologically than a new kidney - looking into the mirror and seeing a different face has to be disturbing. I would argue that looking into the mirror and seeing the corpse-like face of a person with no nose or mouth is a tad bit more fucking disturbing.
The French doctors moved too fast. The transplant was a publicity stunt, and was rushed so the team would be the first to perform this surgery.
To me this is the only issue with any credibility. If the doctors rushed to be the first to try the surgery without perfecting the techniques necessary, then sure that would be an ethical issue. However, the surgery was successful - all the arteries and veins were connected right, the tissue wasn't rejected, and the patient is now recovering. Obviously the doctors knew what they were doing. Also, since this is a brand-new procedure, someone has to do it first. Human face transplant procedures will only be perfected when surgeons start doing them.
Are the surgeons involved looking for personal glory? Sure. I imagine most surgeons are egotistical, and I'm sure they are partially motivated by the fame that will result from being the first to do this operation. Is there anything done anywhere for anybody that isn't at least partially self-motivated? If this turns out to be a success, like it appears to be in the early stages of Dinoire's recovery, then these doctors should be famous, and lauded.
It is unethical to transplant a human face because the face is so strongly associated with who one is.
I don't understand this argument but I hope I expressed it fairly. Some people think that face transplants step over some invisible line that Man Was Not Meant To Cross. Some people think, incorrectly, that the person receiving the transplant will look just like the donor. This is unlikely, given the underlying bone and muscle structural differences between donor and receiver.
However, even if this is true, is that the worst thing in the world? If we take the face from a dead person and give it to someone with a terrible facial injury, what exactly is the downside to that? So that person strongly resembles the dead person now...lots of people look like lots of other people. How often is the recipient of the face going to bump into the donor's parents?
Criticism of this transplant is motivated by several distasteful reasons: jealousy (by those doctors who were beaten to the punch), self-serving publicity (you get a lot more press by being against something than for it, just ask Jeremy Rifkin), and lack of imagination.
By this last category I mean those that lack the insight to push against the boundaries of convention and accept possibilities that, while admittedly strange at first glance, can help people in a profoundly meaningful way. People that are opposed to face transplants just because they are "weird" will also be against human cloning, which has plenty of altruistic applications people don't like to talk about. Cloning of human cells can result in such horrific abominations as cloned organs and tissues that won't be rejected by recipients and yes, babies for infertile people. Would it really be the worst thing in the world if an infertile or homosexual couple raised a child that was a clone?
That makes me wonder, do anti-cloning nutjobs run screaming when they see identical twins? Guess what, CLONES! People like to talk about what's "natural." Well, the natural world is full of murder, rape, cannibalism, and infanticide (just watch a nature show for 10 minutes and you'll figure that out). We humans have minds that will let us transcend nature, and that is NOT a bad thing.
posted by David Bowden at 12:42 PM
